Book Review|Shrewd Short Stories That Merge the Hopeless and the Hopeful

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Shrewd Short Stories That Merge the Hopeless and the Hopeful

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CreditCreditJohn Gall

By Mike Peed

Dec. 7, 2018

CATCH, RELEASEBy Adrianne Harun 223 pp. Johns Hopkins. Paper, $19.95.

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In Harun’s new collection, no family is undamaged, and domestic squabbling is the least of it: Adults murder kids, kids murder adults, savage little ones are dumped with far-flung relatives, righteous children abscond and their relieved parents bolt in the opposite direction. In “The Farmhouse Wife,” a man spurns his partner to sleep with a spectral figure, herself an apparent child-killer and husband-poisoner. Police-scanner shorthand for a barbaric discovery gives its title to “Two Girls Off Quarry Road.”

Told in poised, often shimmering prose, these tales distress and confound. Harun is alive to the fundamental enigma and mutability of violence. Seldom does she burden herself with articulating either its roots or its evolution. “Lost in the War of the Beautiful Lads” sees a mother attempt to safeguard her daughter by moving to a rustic island, only to realize that “we carry the terrors of civilization within us.”

Harun’s resolutions rarely resolve, instead they galvanize into new, uncertain beginnings. “Pink Cloud,” for instance, seems an oversweet depiction of two recovering alcoholics watching the sun descend, until, in the story’s final paragraph, “his eyes flicked toward a kitchen cupboard.” A few stories are insubstantial; one is discordantly political. But the larger, tragic landscape Harun sketches is acutely destabilizing, wonderfully inscrutable and, at moments, ravenously absurd.

At first glance, Batkie’s debut collection appears precariously schematic. Women — lonesome, scarred, wobbling — lead each of the nine stories, which are tidily sorted into three sections: past, present and future. Batkie’s writing is equally disciplined, radiating vibrant, if somewhat vacant, charisma like a practiced holiday guest. But that’s before a trio of late stories achieve an alchemical feat, gold-plating the collection’s themes. Metaphors (for alienation, for insatiate desire) are marvelously transformed into the literal; existential fears (of purpose, of worth) mutate devilishly into the corporeal. In “Cleavage,” a spiritually lost woman suffers physical loss from a mastectomy, only to be tormented by her detached breast, “clawing and clinging like a fidgety child.” The 27-year-old in “Lookaftering,” sensing “a strange uncoiling in her stomach, like a snake letting loose from a trick can,” finds she’s laid a clutch of eggs, a manifestation of her insecurities about love and maternity.

Batkie’s stories shrewdly commingle the hopeless and the hopeful. Her women, demoralized by the absence of fathers and husbands, by stunted careers and aimless children, are locked in self-doubt and self-flagellation, though rarely do they lose faith in “better times,” even when they’ve had slim experience of them. “I did miss being loved,” one character laments, “if you can miss a feeling you have no proof of ever having.”

Through an approach perfected by James Joyce and Sherwood Anderson, Spence’s debut collection, first published in 1977 and newly reissued, surveys a narrow locale to disclose widespread truths. With remarkable precision and emotional weight, these stories depict working-class Glasgow: slummy, rowdy, tribal, drunken, despondent, quixotic and irrepressible. Characters, partitioned into “proddies” and “cathlicks,” are nearly always male, from wily schoolboys who prank their neighbors to desperate teenagers who unleash their discontent at the club. Husbands squander their wages on “the last lingering pint and the chip-shop queue”; old men, clutching flimsy welfare checks, “walk around and fill in the day.” Everything and nothing seems to be shifting. A mother dies, and her son gazes out the window: “It was very ordinary. … The sun shone on the greybrick tenement buildings, on the railings and the tumbledown walls and middens, on the dustbins and the spilled ashes.” Only his imagination locates God in the clouds.

Spence achieves his gravelly realism through raw detail (“Listen. The drip and patter of the rain on wet cardboard”) and deft use of the vernacular (“So ah says tae her ah says Margaret ah says”). He trades customary conflicts and epiphanies for documentary snapshots. In the title story, a man goes on a political march, overdrinks, is called a fascist and hurls a bottle into “the terrible darkness.” In “Tinsel,” a boy decorates his tenement for Christmas, and what reflects in his window is a fantasy “he could never enter.”

THE DOGS OF DETROITBy Brad Felver 169 pp. University of Pittsburgh. $21.95.

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Sorrow and confusion have turned the men in Felver’s zero-sum world into animals. Shaken by tragedy and fueled with masculine pride, they aim to heal by inflicting maximum hurt. Felver’s families crack, and those left behind, bereft of compassion, turn diabolical in their pursuit of torture: of others and of themselves. Life is nothing beyond “an untended aggression” concludes the boy in the title story, who, after losing his drug-addled mother, savors envisioning “the worst things possible: toddler coffins, flayed penguins, pipe bombs in convents, napalm in orphanages.” (He settles for executing Detroit’s stray dogs.) Other characters jam screwdrivers underneath fingernails and snap shins in bear traps. According to the narrator of “How to Throw a Punch,” “Once you learn how to do it, you want to do it often.”

Felver can be inventive with tone, diction and perspective — and heartbreakingly solemn when he wants to be. Both “The Era of Good Feelings,” in which a high-school history teacher, burying his father, appraises his personal past, and “Hide-and-Seek,” in which estranged brothers collide at an airport bar, coolly dissect woe amid death and regret. But more often “The Dogs of Detroit” proves a shallow riff on an isolated theme. Felver may situate his tales from New York through Ohio up to Montana but their gratuitous savagery homogenizes these settings. Characters are similarly flattened by their penchant for destruction. Lines like “What would we do now, what would we hate now?” become their unthinking refrain.

Mike Peed has written for The New Yorker, The Washington Post and other publications. He teaches English at Choate Rosemary Hall.